What are The Predator and Halloween doing at TIFF? They’re not the only sequels

By Nick PatchSpecial to the Star

Sun., Sept. 2, 2018

For those of us with Hollywood franchise fatigue, film festivals used to offer a refreshing respite from the surplus of sequels.

So film buffs would be forgiven for raising a skeptical eyebrow at the fact that this year’s Toronto International Film Festival features both the Halloween reboot — the 11th instalment in that franchise — and Shane Black’s reimagining of The Predator amid its reliably daring Midnight Madness programming.

The latest iteration in the Predator franchise makes its world premiere at TIFF’s Midnight Madness program. (courtesy TIFF)

“I’ve experienced that fatigue at the multiplex myself,” Kuplowsky said. “I did not approach The Predator and Halloween without trepidation. I know they’re both films with a lot of baggage.

“In both cases, these were films that in different ways were taking a sequel and being bold with it. They weren’t looking for reasons to justify their own existence.”

Article Continued Below

Well, who said a sequel has to be superfluous? Here’s a look at five sequels at this month’s TIFF, none of which appears to be merely a reheated repeat.

Halloween

Michael Myers hasn’t always been treated with much care in the years since John Carpenter’s 1978 trend-setting slasher classic. Jamie Lee Curtis was so sick of the role she insisted her Laurie Strode get killed off in 2002’s Halloween Resurrection. The last attempt at a franchise reboot occurred 11 years ago.

But you can’t kill the boogeyman, and 40 years after the release of the original, writer-director David Gordon Green’s sequel — which ignores all but the very first film in the series — has fans optimistic that Halloween will be restored to its former glory. Curtis was persuaded back into the fold and horror fans should follow suit, Kuplowsky says.

“Halloween is a great horror movie,” he raved. “It’s one of the scariest slashers in years. It understands the genre so well back to front that it knows when the audience is expecting something, and it knows how to give them what they’re expecting and then twist it in a way they didn’t know they wanted.

“It’s supremely satisfying.”

Fahrenheit 11/9

Article Continued Below

Can this really be considered a sequel, or just a title that was simply too clever to resist? Either way, documentarian agitator Michael Moore has evoked the name of his most successful film, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, to again shed light on the grime in the White House. Premiering at TIFF, Fahrenheit 11/9 provides Moore with perhaps his most formidable foe yet in Donald Trump, whom Moore refers to ominously in the trailer as “the last president of the United States.”

That remark is preceded by the image of the American flag burning, and — sequel or no — this indeed promises to be the most incendiary film Moore has issued since its namesake.

Sharkwater Extinction

One of the most anticipated documentaries in this year’s program, this conservationist call-to-action is the final film from Rob Stewart, the decorated Toronto filmmaker and activist who died during its making.

The 2006 original was instrumental in jolting many countries to ban shark finning, and yet even that influence was insufficient to reverse the tide that has led to a 90 per cent decrease in the shark population over 30 years. So Sharkwater Extinction offers no less urgency in exploring how corruption, pirates and legal workarounds have kept the shark-finning industry afloat.

The Fall of the American Empire

Though decorated Quebec director Denys Arcand’s new film isn’t a sequel in the traditional sense, it’s regarded as the third in a thematic trilogy that began with 1986’s The Decline of the American Empire — the first Canadian movie to be nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars — and continued with 2003’s The Barbarian Invasions, which was the first Canadian movie to win best foreign language film at the Oscars.

This time, Arcand follows a 36-year-old Quebec delivery-truck driver who witnesses a double murder during an armed robbery and must decide what to do with the two hefty bags of cash he stumbles upon.

Where the previous two films in this unofficial trio shared characters, the link with this philosophical heist thriller is that once again Arcand is exploring the different ways in which civilization is crumbling.

The Predator

It’s unlikely many fans were gnashing their teeth in anticipation of another in the prolific Predator series, but the hiring of writer-director Shane Black and co-writer Fred Dekker might have changed that.

Black — who, as an actor, was actually a victim in John McTiernan’s original 1987 Predator — has some experience gently disrupting a flagship franchise with 2013’s Iron Man 3, but his drastic reimagining of The Predator in fact reminded Kuplowsky of Black’s last cult-favourite collaboration with Dekker.

“Like (1987’s) The Monster Squad, it’s a film that is both thrilling and irreverent and loving to this universe,” he said. “It’s sardonic and snarky because it’s absolutely a Shane Black film, but it has real fun with the material. It’s not playing with kids’ gloves and it’s not colouring within the lines. It’s going where its creator wanted to take the story.”